Why it's time for Scottish folk to change its tune

In trad Scots music, it seems the bigger the bang the better – which means all-male bands tearing up the place. Why are so many musicians falling back on retro macho stereotypes – and who are the women challenging the status quo?

This year’s Celtic Connections festival is billed as “a celebration of inspiring women artists”. Headline acts at the Glasgow festival include Roberta Sá, Olivia Newton John, Martha Wainwright and Karine Polwart. Thursday’s opening concert featured Laura Marling with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; 81-year-old English folk legend Shirley Collins performs on the penultimate night. The theme was originally devised as an outward-facing statement, says festival director Donald Shaw. He mentions singer Aziza Brahim, born in a Sahrawi refugee camp in Algeria and appearing at the opening weekend. “Music was her road to freedom. If festivals like ours make a point of expressing positives around what women bring to music and what music brings to women, at the very least that might embarrass platforms in other parts of the world that don’t give women proper representation.”

Yet Shaw acknowledges gender imbalances closer to home: folk music in Scotland is not yet a level playing field. Partly this is a numbers problem: more male than female artists are booked, there are more all-male bands than all-female bands or acts with at least one female member. I asked the Celtic Connections office six times for the gender ratio of this year’s artists, and was told repeatedly “we don’t have that figure”. It seems indicative of a lack of general discourse around the subject that, even this year, the festival were not championing 50/50 gender representation, nor even talking about the balance.

One person who has been pushing the conversation into the open is Rachel Newton, harpist and vocalist in the Shee. She was concerned to notice that the nominations for the best live act in 2016’s Scots Trad music awards were almost exclusively all-male bands. Of the six acts on the shortlist, only one – Blazin’ Fiddles – included women. Newton wrote a post on Facebook in which she described feeling “overwhelmed by the amount of all-male and more importantly very masculine bands that are dominating the Scottish traditional music scene.” The subsequent comment thread raised a rallying cry: “Time to break down the walls of male dom cock folk!”

Scottish traditional music should arguably be enlightened in this respect. Grassroots socialism and everyman/woman equality were essential values of the urban folk revival of the 1960s. So why are many of today’s artists falling back on retro stereotypes of the kinds of sounds men and women should be making?

Simon Thoumire, director of Hands Up for Trad which hosts the Trad awards, says that when he wants to book an opening or closing act “that is in-your-face and wakes people up, I struggled to think of a female bands I could use for that slot”. He mentions the female 10-piece Songs of Separation who played at last year’s awards. “Some women in the audience thought they played a banging show. I loved their sound, but I didn’t think it was banging. Maybe men and women have different ideas of what banging music is. Maybe men listen to more heavy stuff in their youth and maybe that means our reference points are different.” Is he suggesting men have an innate attraction to heavier kinds of music? “Maybe. Maybe it’s an animalistic thing. Maybe we want pounding stuff because instinctively we should be out hunting.” Incidentally, Thoumire has asked Newton to put together an all-female band to open the 2017 Trad awards.

‘Women can be every bit as feisty’ … Julie Fowlis. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Julie Fowlis – Gaelic singer, instrumentalist and presenter of the BBC folk awards – is less inclined to buy into such gender determinism. “Music is not essentially male or female. Women can be every bit as feisty and fist-punching,” she says. “But it’s true that in Scotland we do have a bunch of all-male bands playing a certain type of music, generally booked as headliners to finish off a night.”

One factor might be the way bands are formed. If men stay latest and play loudest at pub sessions, are most heavily fuelled by whatever substances are being consumed and end up falling into bands together, the music will probably sound accordingly. Shaw says he knows “plenty of bands, including my own [Capercaillie], whose social and moral decorum is enhanced by having a girl there to keep us on the level. There are also plenty of boys in the folk scene who indulge in a seriously hedonistic drinking culture, and maybe they keep their circles tight.”

Why does the folk scene seem happier accepting women as singers than as instrumentalists?

Consider the machismo image adopted by Treacherous Orchestra, a Glasgow outfit that plays loud and fast and favours a stage uniform of chains and black leathers. “They’ve been going to metal gigs and decided that’s the crowd they want to attract – they’re driven by audience rather than by the integrity of their own music,” says Shaw.

And why does the folk scene seem happier accepting women as singers than as instrumentalists? The festival’s female headliners are all singers. Fowlis grew up playing in pipe bands but has mainly become known as a champion of Gaelic song. Newton suggests that “a lot of female instrumentalists feel they need to sing in order to get ahead”. Statistics from the BBC folk awards support her theory: in their 16-year history, the instrumental musician of the year category has been won by just one woman (Kathryn Tickell), whereas women outnumber men in the folk singer of the year category.

Thoumire sums it up: “We have a back-line issue,” he says, citing the number of female folk singers who employ male backing bands. Even String Sisters, an ensemble designed to showcase awesome female fiddlers, is backed by a male rhythm section. The reason is not access – young girls have equal opportunities to learn drums and guitar. Can it really be an image obstacle? Shaw wonders whether, “if a woman straps on an electric guitar, is she genuinely absolutely comfortable when she starts sweating?” I mention Patti Smith, to name just one musician who has no problem sweating on stage. “True,” says Shaw. “Didn’t she say that in her day it wasn’t a good gig unless she either pissed in her pants or came in them…”

Well, quite. If other realms of the music world rehearsed this conversation several decades ago, why is the folk world so slow to catch up?

Shaw wonders whether the problem now is especially acute on Scotland’s west coast, where music is “rooted in Gaelic tribalism and a mentality of working the land hard, working the sea, long hours then going crazy for 48 hours. That culture still exists on the isles and has spilled into the music.”

Runrig, from Skye, reached the ultimate zenith of Celt-rock fusion in 1991 when a crowd of 50,000 in Balloch Country Park watched Donnie Munro belt out Loch Lomond in saltire-emblazoned leathers. The phenomenon spawned the likes of Skerryvore, Skipinnish, Mànran (all west coasters), Wolfstone and Treacherous Orchestra.

That landmark Runrig gig articulated a nationalist fervour that felt no need for nuance. The event was declared a gathering of the clans, language harkening back to pre-Clearance Highland mythology, despite this being a year post-Thatcher, five years pre-Trainspotting, six years pre-devolution. Now as then, folk music is an essential commodity for a small nation crafting an identity that is deep-rooted and distinct from its neighbours. And yet that still does not explain the binary gender notions – because today’s Scottish civic nationalism is a much subtler arena. Scotland’s party leaders are either women or non-heterosexual, or both. The independence movement has gravitated towards Scandinavian social democratic models: strong welfare values and, yes, gender equality.

A political climate that encourages its folk culture to be populist, in which Runrig spin-offs headline mainstream pop festivals, risks “smoothing the edges” of the music, Newton worries. “Folk music should be wary of the mainstream,” she says. “Maybe in our obsession with reaching a wider audience there is a danger of dumbing down the interesting and challenging aspects of the music.” Perhaps it comes back to Shaw’s concern that artists are driven by commercial concerns rather than the integrity of their music. “Folk musicians are crap at marketing,” says Thoumire. “The folk world is littered with appalling album covers,” Shaw agrees. Traditional music is popular in Scotland: could it be that musicians are simply conforming to unreconstructed stereotypes of how men and women should look and sound in order to fit a mainstream industry notion of what will sell?

That the conversation is only now addressing the representation of men and women, while so much of the arts world has moved on to matters of gender fluidity and beyond, shows how far the folk world has to catch up. Nobody I spoke to favours a quota system, whereby festivals book artists on a gender basis, though Newton did persuade the festival to let her host a panel debate about gender.

And Scotland is not alone: when Cambridge folk festival announced its first round of confirmed acts for 2017, there was not a single female musician on the bill — which indicates that an all-male lineup is deemed acceptable, or perhaps just not deemed at all. If the Brexits and Trumps of 2016 have us anything, it is just how quickly the social advances of the past 70 years can be dismantled. Now more than ever, we need to keep making the case for progressive liberalism, in our music as much as in our politics.